Undeterred by purge rumors, women peace activists leave for Pyongyang

[bananas]

Source: NK News

With endorsements from North and South Korea, a group of women activists departed from Beijing on Tuesday for Pyongyang, where they will walk to Seoul in the hopes of the two Koreas signing a peace treaty.

The group departed amid controversy sparked by North Korea’s possible brutal execution of its Minister of Defense, Hyon Yong Chol, which raised doubts on whether the timing is appropriate. In their defense, the group argued that there has yet been any proof of the purge and they prefer not to link the two incidents.

“The timing is out of our hands,” Suzy Kim, a professor of Korean history at Rutgers University who is one of the organizers of the event. “Whatever happened domestically within North Korea, in some ways, is not something we can control.”

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The activists, including Gloria Steinem, a veteran American women’s rights activist, and Mairead Maguire, Northern Ireland Nobel Peace Prize winner, plan to take two peace walks and a peace symposium in North Korea.

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Read more: http://www.nknews.org/2015/05/border-crossers-leave-for-pyongyang/

[bananas]

1. Gloria Steinem on why she’s going to North Korea

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/05/01/gloria-steinem-on-why-shes-going-to-north-korea/

Gloria Steinem on why she’s going to North Korea
By Anna Fifield May 1

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Washington Post: Tell me about the purpose of this march. Why are you joining it, and what do you think it can achieve?

Gloria Steinem: Our purpose has been to call attention to this unresolved conflict that I suspect most people or many people have forgotten. For one thing, I'm the oldest person on this trip, I'm the only one who remembers the Korean War and the armistice, and I'm not sure others do. So it seems an obligation to point it out, especially since in my lifetime I have been told that the Soviet Union absolutely could not change without major bloodshed, that apartheid would never end in South Africa without an enormous war, that the Berlin Wall would not fall as long as the Soviet Union existed, that the Irish conflict would never [be] solved. I’ve been consistently told that all of these conflicts would not end without war. Yet they have, and they have ended because people talked to each other. So it seemed important to support the many people I have met in South Korea and also refugees from North Korea who want this opportunity to bring families together, to at least be able to travel freely and talk to each other.

WP: This is a diverse group of celebrated women you're traveling with. What lessons/advice will each of you have for the governments in both North and South Korea?

GS: We are really there to listen and learn, to say we care by being physically present. There is no substitute for putting your bodies where your concerns are. If I have any message myself, it’s that in my experience conflicts are far more likely to be solved when people sit down together. I asked a friend of mine who is a neurologist if the chemicals, the hormones that allow us to empathize with each other are produced by looking at a television screen or at a computer screen, and she said no -- you have to be together with all five senses in order to produce the oxytocin that allows us to empathize with each other. It just underlined to me the importance of human contact. We’re communal creatures; we have been sitting around campfires for 100,000 years; we need to see each other in order to understand each other. Of course it isn’t up to me to decide what happens in Korea; it’s up to the people who live there, both North and South. But I hope we can be helpful by providing an example of human contact between north and south.

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[niyad]

3. thank you!

[bananas]

2. website WomenCrossDMZ.org

http://WomenCrossDMZ.org

[niyad]

4. thank you for the link!!

[geomon666]

5. I've got a bad feeling about this. n/t